Thursday, March 29, 2012

Constructing Online Survey Questionnaires

By Nia Lawrence


When doing surveys online, the survey design or questionnaire will be very important to consider. How the questions are formed will have a great impact on the results in the end. While you must make the questions engaging so as not to lose the interest of the respondents, you must also ensure that they don't sound or look biased to avoid getting tainted results. Here are some tips when making web survey questionnaires.

The first thing you have to deal with is the main objective of your survey. Why are you conducting one and what is it for? If, for instance, the survey is about gauging how your customers perceive your business and your products and solutions, you can make questions that will directly ask them what they like and do not like about your company. You need to have a main objective as this will guide you in constructing the questions that you want to be answered in your online survey.

While you want to get as much info as you want, you have to stay focused on your main objective. Don't go asking questions that are not directly related to the objective you have in mind. This will help you keep your survey as short as possible. An ideal survey needs to be answered in less than 10 minutes. Anything longer than that will make the respondent more bored and there's also a possibility for them to not be too truthful about their answers. While you intend to get all the answers you want in your survey, you won't achieve a high response rate if the respondents get bored or uninterested to give long answers to your questions. Limit your open-ended questions because many people are too lazy to give long answers. At the same time, don't give too many choices in your questions because they may just confuse the respondent.

As you can see in numerous survey template materials online, it is a common practice to make a short and simple survey. Answering the whole survey must be done in 10 minutes, or preferably shorter. This means that it will be important to screen your questions so you won't ask something that is not really connected to the main objective of the survey. Long surveys will also just bore the respondent. For open-ended questions, remember to keep them at a minimum because many respondents are too lazy to explain themselves in surveys. As for multiple choice-questions, you have to give as few choices as possible so as not to confuse your respondent.

The flow of the questions must also be smooth and logical. You can group questions that cover similar issues, as well as introduce survey sections to the respondents. This way, the respondents can understand better what you want to uncover in a particular section of the survey. After completing the questions, you can discuss it with your colleagues to know what can still be added or changed. It would be a lot better if you can run some test surveys and ask the respondents what they think about the survey. A piece of survey software can then be utilized to efficiently collate and analyze the data gathered after the survey proper. Don't hesitate to share findings to clients after they have been collated and organized. This is not only to inform them how the web surveying turned out, but also to explain to them how you intend to use the results to better improve your business solutions and your company in general.




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